Rogers goes dark

Canada's largest wireless phone company went off line yesterday with all its wireless voice services and some messaging capabilities switched off.

Rogers, also a major cable-TV operator, said its data services were not affected. Talking this morning the company said that it worked as quickly as possible to restore service and it was gradually restored over the course of the evening. The company said it is investigating the root cause of the outage and that services are gradually resuming. It is still not clear how the company's entire operations could shut down in such a spectacular way.

The main fear was that many customers relied on their phones for emergency services. Police in Toronto warned residents about the problems in case they had an emergency and had to call 911. The City of Calgary advised Rogers customers who needed to reach emergency services that if they didn't have a land line, they should ask to use the phone of a neighbour or a store in their area.